Darin David Barney and David Laycock, "Right-Populists
and Plebiscitary Politics in Canada," Party Politics,
5 (July 1999), 317-339.

First Paragraph:
The Reform Party of Canada's use and promotion of direct
democracy is one of more than a dozen cases explored at the
1997 ECPR workshop on Political Parties and Plebiscitary
Politics. Established a decade ago but already Canada's
official parliamentary opposition, Reform has growing and
influential company in western party systems as a
right-populist, anti-statist party interested in the popular
appeal and potential anti-party clout of direct democracy.
In this paper, we demonstrate how a critical appraisal of
the Reform Party's plebiscitarianism contributes to
understanding the politics of direct democracy. On first
encounter, Reform's interest in direct democracy might be
accounted for in terms of their members' desire to
democratize Canadian public life. More cynically, one might
focus on their leaders' desire to capitalize electorally on
growing levels of citizen dissatis-faction with existing
representative politics.

Figures and Tables:
Figure 1: Plebiscitarian political space

Last Paragraph:
This latter scenario is far from improbable in many western
polities. For reasons we hope to have suggestively sketched,
this scenario also provides a congenial opening for
plebiscitarian responses to citizen alienation. Our
theoretical location of plebiscitarianism within democratic
representational space suggests that the primary suppliers
of plebiscitarian alternatives will be leader-dominated
parties of the new right, offering opportunities for
unmediated and non-deliberative approaches to policy choice.
These choices will revolve principally around defections
from supporting the public goods of the welfare state, and
from the democratic associational and representative
networks that sustain these goods. Insofar as the experience
of the Reform Party of Canada testifies to links between
plebiscitarianism and the socio-political project of the new
right, we believe it holds instructive lessons for those
wishing to explain the appeal of direct democracy to
right-populist parties-- and voters-- in many liberal
democracies.